A Coupang customer in Seoul could order groceries at midnight and find them at the door before 7 a.m. The company called it Rocket Delivery. Bom Kim built Coupang in South Korea, a dense country where fast delivery could reach almost everyone. By the time it filed to go public in 2021, Coupang employed more than 50,000 people and was one of Korea's three largest private employers.

Building the Whole Road

Kim founded Coupang in 2010. It started as a daily deals site and turned into an online store that owned its own logistics. Coupang built warehouses, hired its own drivers, and wrote the software that tied them together. The bet was that controlling every step would make next-day delivery cheap enough to offer on nearly every order. It added fresh groceries with Rocket Fresh and food delivery with Coupang Eats.

A Korean Giant in New York

Coupang priced its offering at $35 a share in March 2021 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as CPNG. The stock rose about 41 percent on its first day. Kim held Class B shares with 29 votes each, which gave him about 77 percent of the voting power. Coupang later expanded into Taiwan and bought the luxury retailer Farfetch. It still trades on the NYSE as CPNG.

Cover: Man Lighting a Rocket, also called Peace is Better than a Victory, from Communia Gaudia (The Wide-Spread Rejoicing at the Siege of Namur), Cornelis Dusart. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a man lighting a rocket (Rocket Delivery).